Kenneth Arnold was piloting his private plane over Mount Rainier, in Washington, on June 24, 1947, when he suddenly saw nine silver flying discs.

They were, he said, shaped “like a saucer if you skip it across water.”

Sam Gnerre

The highly publicized sighting not only led to the coining of the term “flying saucer,” but also led to a rash of similar sightings across the country. Of course, the idea of beings from other worlds traveling to Earth in spaceships had already become a staple in science fiction, but Arnold’s sighting, and others that quickly followed, seemed to inflame the public’s imagination.

The flying saucers may or may not have literally come to Earth, but the mysterious allure of them immediately landed fully formed into American pop culture. Books, magazines, films, television — all were awash in tales of space aliens visiting earth in flying saucers.

The Flying Saucers ride at Disneyland in Anaheim operated from 1961 to 1966. It was located where the Tomorrowland Stage, opened in 1967, now stands. (Credit: Los Angeles Public Library, Herald Examiner photo collection)

The U.S. government, especially the newly formed United States Air Force, denied any knowledge of the existence of the dazzling extraterrestrial spacecraft, which only seemed to fuel public imagination and curiosity.

The Air Force did collect data and issue studies on the phenomenon, assigning a broader term — unidentified flying objects, or UFOs — in 1952 to describe all types of such sightings.

Mrs. Clyde Beck of Torrance reported seeing what was believed to be the city’s first flying saucer, a shiny silver hovering object, while dining outdoors with two friends at her Hollywood Riviera home on March 12, 1952, according to the Torrance Herald.

Of course, there were those earthlings who testified that the saucers not only were real, but also had landed long enough to pick them up and take them for a spin.

Truman Bethurum

On Sept. 24, 1953, Redondo Beach resident Truman Bethurum told the Daily Breeze that he had seen flying saucers, and, what’s more, had been taken aboard one of them for a flight while working on a road crew near Glendale Junction, Nevada.

The article caused a sensation, and over a series of stories, Bethrum revealed that he had taken 11 such flights with aliens from the planet Clarion, who were led by their captain, Aura Rhanes.

According to one Breeze story, Capt. Rahnes was a beautiful woman who had a “slender Latin-type face” and wore a radiant red skirt, black velvet short sleeve blouse and a black beret with red trim.

Clarion was a planet that always stayed on the far side of the moon’s orbit, and therefore could not be detected from Earth.

Bethurum’s fanciful, detailed stories were a hit on the lecture circuit and he did many radio and television interviews about them. In 1954, he wrote a book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, that told his whole story, and wrote several other related books.

Alas, after his initial visits with the Clarionites, they never returned to visit again. Neither did Bethurum, who moved from Redondo Beach in the late 1960s. He later lived in Arizona and Salt Lake City, and died in Yucca Valley in 1969.

This 1951 Popular Library paperback helped fuel the craze.

During his time in the South Bay, Bethurum became friends with a precursor in the UFO field, George Adamski, one of the first self-styled UFO “experts.” Adamski co-wrote the 1953 book, “Flying Saucers Have Landed,” based on his encounter with “Saucerians” in the desert near Blythe in November 1952. Two years later, his book “Inside the Space Ships” was published.

Adamski also appeared locally on the lecture circuit, showing pictures of purported extraterrestrial phenomenon taken at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County.

To the Torrance Herald’s credit, reporter Ralph R. Gompertz researched and interviewed Adamski, publishing a story on Jan. 7, 1954, that concluded that Adamski was the head of a religious cult that “capitalized on the popularity of flying saucers” to spread his utopian ideas.

Not to be outdone, former flight attendant Glora Lee of Rolling Hills also claimed to have encountered extraterrestrials while working as a hostess at Los Angeles International Airport in September 1953.

She wrote the book, “Why We Are Here” — allegedly with help from an inhabitant from Jupiter — about her experiences. In 1959, she gave a talk to members of a group, called Understanding, who were interested in outer space contact, according to the Herald. Lee titled the talk, “Revelations from the Space People — on Love, Sex and Marriage.”

Phillip Knox was another frequent speaker on the South Bay lecture circuit during the 1950s whose talks combined photos of flying saucers and other unexplained phenomenon with religious themes.

The Air Force kept statistics on UFO sightings through its Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book. Most of those recorded during the 1950s and 1960s involved saucer-like craft. The Air Force stopped collecting data on the topic in 1970.

By the 1970s, invading spaceships had taken on a variety of different forms. Sightings were more easily debunked as resulting from a variety of non-alien sources, such as weather balloons, vapor trails from missile launches and other more mundane causes.

California leads the nation with more than 12,000 reported sightings of UFOs over the years, according to the National UFO Reporting Center and the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, a first-of-its-kind book that analyzes such sightings.

Sightings still occur — an apparition resulting from a SpaceX Falcon Nine launch on Dec. 22, 2017, caused an uproar across Southern California — but most (though not all) of them can be explained logically.

Maybe things really were more fun back when we wanted to believe inhabitants from Jupiter and Mars — and Clarion — really were swinging by for a visit to Earth.

Sam Gnerre has worked for the Daily Breeze in Torrance since 1984. He grew up in Fontana, Calif., and is a graduate of Fontana High School. He earned a B.A. in English literature from the University of California, Riverside, and a Master's degree in library science from UCLA. He was hired at the Daily Breeze in 1984 to help with the conversion of the paper's manual clip file system to an online database of archived stories. Currently, he writes the paper's weekly News Quiz, does a weekly music CD review, and researches and writes local history articles for the South Bay History blog, in addition to his current duties as a night website editor for the Southern California News Group.